While surrounded by friends such as these, and squandering all he could obtain by any arts however contemptible, he finds it necessary to procure money by some expedient or other, and resolves to make usc of Mrs. Ford, who is said to have "the rule of her husband's purse,' and Mrs. Page, whom he describes as "a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty." These ladies he determines to make his "East and West Indies;" to effect which it was necessary that he should at least seem to love them. For their purses he entertains an unfeigned affection, and he pretends to feel a desire for their persons.. Whatever might have been the disposition of these Merry Wives to admit a sub rosa admirer, they were too prudent, and perhaps too virtuous, to yield to the feeble inducements presented by Sir John Falstaff; but the one to ridicule the idle fears of a jealous husband, and the other to afford herself amusement, determine to encourage the addresses of the knight, and the various schemes practised upon him preserve the vivacity of the play with an interest and animation scarcely equalled in the circle of the drama. The concealment in the basket, the metamorphosis into the old woman of Brentford, and the torments inflicted at Herne's Oak in the Park, are all lively exhibitions of the punishment of profligacy and the consequences of gray-haired intrigue.

The courtship commences very properly by letter, and Sir John addresses a counterpart to each lady in the true spirit of gallantry and devotion. These effusions contain three essential requisites for a billet doux, and therefore may be considered admirable of their kind. In the first place, they are absolute nonsense; secondly, they are altogether false; and, thirdly, they contain rhyme: with these ingredients the knight thought he could gain any woman.

"Ask me no reason why I love you; for though Love use Reason for his physician, he admits him not for his counsellor: you are not young, no more am I go to then, there's sympathy; you are merry, so am I; ha! ba! then there's more sympathy: you love sack, so do I; would you desire better sympathy? Let it suffice thee, mistress Page, (at the least if the love of a soldier can suffice) that I love thee. I will not say, pity me, 'tis not a soldier-like phrase; but I say, love me. By me

Thine own true knight,

By day or night,

Or any kind of light,

• This idea of writing the same letter to two persons has been imitated by several authors, and with great humour and success by Moliere in his L'Amour à la Mode, where Dorotée sends the same letter to Oronte and Eraste, who retort the jest very happily upon her.

As this epistle is a masterpiece of love letters, so his first interview is a masterpiece of love conversations.

Falstaff. Have I caught thee, my heavenly jewel? Why now let me die, for I have lived long enough; this is the period of my ambition: O, this blessed hour.

Mrs. Ford. O sweet Sir John!

Falstaff. Mistress Ford, I cannot cog, I cannot prate, Mistress Ford. Now shall I sin in my wish; I would thy husband were dead; I'll speak it before the best lord, I would make thee my lady.

Mrs. Ford. I your lady, Sir John! alas, I should be a pitiful lady.

Falstaff. Let the Court of France show me such another; I see how thine eye would emulate the diamond: thou hast the right arched bent of the brow, that becomes the ship-tire, the tire valiant, or any tire of Venetian admittance.

Mrs. Ford. Do not betray me Sir, I fear you love mistress Page.

Falstaff. Thou mightst as well say I love to walk by the counter gate; which is as hateful to me as the reek of a lime-kiln.

Here he takes care to commend his mistress to the skies, to boast of raptures that he cannot feel, and to abuse her rival with the same sincerity that he praises herself. After the first unfortunate rencontre, in which he is almost suffocated in a basket of foul linen, and then plunged hissing hot into mud and water, he half resolves to see no more of the fair tormentors: but the golden prospects tempt him to another trial, in which he fares no better than before.

In relating his beating to his supposed friend Brook, the knight's ingenuity is exercised in a way not inferior to his artful subtleties with the Prince of Wales; for as instinct prompted him to run from the true prince, so, being in woman's shape, he could not but act like a woman with Ford, "for," says he, "in the shape of a man, Goliath with a weaver's beam."

I fear not

After a third defeat, in which the spectators of his mortification are more numerous than before, every thing is explained to Sir John, and he is fully convinced of the vanity and absurdity of his attempts. On a discovery and explanation, the knight is subjected to the taunts of all parties, and submits to them with considerable humility.

Mrs. Page. Why, Sir John, do you think, though we would have thrust virtue out of our hearts by the head and shoulders, and have given ourselves without scruple to hell, that ever the Devil could have made you our delight?

Ford. What, a hodge pudding! a bag of flax!

Mrs Page. A puffed man?

Page. Old, cold, wither'd, and of intolerable entrails?

Ford. And one that is as slanderous as Satan?

Page. And as poor as Job?

Ford. And as wicked as his wife?

Evans. And given to fornications, and to taverns, and sack, and wine, and metheglins, and to drinkings, and swearings, and starings, pribbles and prabbles?

Falstaff. Well, I am your theme: you have the start of me; I am dejected; I am not able to answer the Welch flannel: ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me: use me as you will.

Shakspeare thus performed the task assigned him. He had framed a character incapable of refinement of sentiment or tenderness of affection; he therefore made his attentions to women but a step to the attainment of gold. Falstaff's conduct appears in some degree that of a lover, but his views extended far beyond the limits of personal attachment, and Interest was the mistress he adored.

I.

THE SCRIBBLER, NO. V.- FOR THE PORT FOLIO.

YOUR Countrymen, said a splenetic friend of mine, who has travelled a good deal in America, are a nation of readers. Taking one with another, a far greater number of the people devote some of their time to reading, than of any other nation of the world. In Great Britain, France, and Germany, those who do, or who can read, bear a very small proportion to the rest, They are scarcely one in twenty; but in America almost every man is a student.

They read, not casually, or now and then, but regularly and daily. They betake themselves to reading as punctually as to dine or to labour. Surely, then, they must be a very learned nation. All their minds must be tuned to a generous and enlightened key. Society must wear among them, a face totally different from that of any other nation;-and is not this the truth?

Why, one must pause a little, and inquire, What is it they read? Books of history, or poetry, or science, or morals? Much depends upon

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the kind of reading. Are their studies confined to meagre ballads, or fabulous legends? If they be, we can only expect them to be confirmed in every silly prejudice or vile superstition. A sort of volume is left, daily, at every man's door. What are its usual contents? To judge of its efficacy it is necessary to know the tenor of it.

If we examine these volumes we shall find them to be nothing more than newspapers; sheets, in which the two factions, who divide the nation, perpetually fight their battles; and, in every species of invective and stratagem, endeavour to get the better of their adversaries. In this school, you may judge what progress the American student is likely to make in the art of governing his passions, enriching his fancy, or enlarging his understanding.

It is thus that the traveller affected to sneer at us poor Americans for our attachment to the noble pursuits of history and politics. I would fain know, Mr. Caviller, returned I, how the time of a citizen can be better employed than in watching the conduct of his governors, in detecting their mistakes, and, if need be, censuring or displacing them. For what end has the power of choosing our governors and legislators been vested in us, if we do not exercise it with judgment and vigilance; we do not investigate their claims to our favours, and regulate our choice by the tendency of those measures which we know they will adopt.

But mere political discussions do not wholly engross these publications. Are they not, continually, supplied with intelligence from all nations! And do they not inform us of the fate of battles, the schemes of statesmen, and the change of rulers in every part of the world? And what objects are more sublime, more interesting to the rational inquirer, than n the successive scenes of this great drama?

There is no soul among us so sordid and grovelling that has not an active curiosity in relation to these great events. He will always lay down his groat for the sake of knowing what they are doing in Germany, Egypt, or Bengal. The scene cannot be so remote but we have an eye to it; and Napoleon the emperor, and Charles the archduke are people with whom every American, the meanest and most laborious among us, is as intimately acquainted, as with his next door neighbour.

Not convinced by these reasonings, my companion continued to insinuate, that to know the incidents of a German or Spanish campaign, cannot very materially benefit a native of America, who has his bread to get by his industry, and his family to cherish by domestic virtues. He prated much about the necessity of limiting our attention, in the first place, to our own family affairs; and, if those will allow any of our time to be employed in general pursuits, he urged that it ought to be devoted to the improvement of the heart and the understanding by writings that explain to us our personal duties, and illustrate them by

familiar, pertinent, and amusing examples; by books that advance us in the knowledge of the properties and processes of nature; that make us, or tend to make us, better fathers, husbands, and neighbours; better artists or husbandmen.

“Now, no instruction of this kind, he continued, can be gained from the bickerings of faction, vulgarly called politics, and from the shreds and fragments, trifling, contradictory, and vague, to be found in newspapers, and gravely dignified with the name of history. Is any profes sional skill, any maxim of domestic economy or of social conduct, any improvement in the condition of ourselves or our neighbours, to be drawn from these fountains? How is any man the better in his taste, his temper, or his fortune; how is any man the wiser, in any art or science worth knowing, by hearing that so many Austrians were killed in this affair, and so many Frenchmen in that.

"A newspaper, considered as one among a merchant's documents, is a very good thing; as conveying, in due season, information of what is to be bought and sold; of ships arrived, or departing, or taken, or wrecked;-may not be, conveniently, dispensed with by the owners of ships, and the venders and buyers of commodities; but why so many of its pages should be stuffed with declamation against individuals and with scraps of news respecting the operations of armies and ambassadors in another hemisphere is not easily conceived.

"If these events are worth knowing, it is ridiculously absurd to seek the knowledge in this way. Stay till a little time has rendered the issue of transactions certain, and stay till you have the whole of the particular event, in all its parts and incidents, before you, instead of indulging a childish impatience, and eagerly swallowing every mutilated lying rumor. A little time will not only afford you an authentic account of an event, but will save you all that expense of time which is wasted in procuring and reading premature, unauthentic, and, what is worse, unintelligible statements.

"If the knowledge of great events, passing in the other hemisphere, be of any value, newspapers, as at present conducted, are liable to insurmountable objections, inasmuch as, instead of faithfully and accurately affording this knowledge, they only tend to confuse, bewilder, and mislead. In all they give us there is such confusion or contradiction of dates,—such opposite accounts of the same events,-such idle and incessant repetitions, that no mortal can extricate himself from qut the chaos. After a week's study a man may safely conclude that a certain battle has been fought, or a certain treaty has been ratified; but as to the causes and circumstances that belong to them, the memory is merely burthened with a discordant and obscure mass. Of these he knows nothing, till some impartial and enlightened observer has